One of my favourite running stories is about Wolf Bronet, a Holocaust survivor who moved to Montreal and began running out of the YMCA on Westbury Avenue in 1954. Bronet, 88, and as dedicated a runner as you’re likely to meet, doesn’t spend too much time on the science of running.

“There was no such thing as meshugenah endorphins, all we knew was that it made us feel free,” says Bronet, who has run both with Terry Fox and at the Boston Marathon and still goes out regularly on two-hour jogs. “Yeah, there’s medical science and all the rest of this stuff, but to me, running’s the most natural thing.”

In hindsight, that freedom that Bronet was feeling may have been the medically proven phenomenon known as the “runner’s high.” A neurochemical response to the body’s release of opioids (the meshugenah endorphins that researchers recently demonstrated at the University of Bonn), the runner’s high is a feeling of euphoria, a state of bliss when strenuous exercise gives way to a feeling of calm.

“It’s the part in a run where endorphins peak and everything you experience feels like it’s no longer work,” says Dr. Marni Wesner, a physician at the Glen Sather Sports Medicine Clinic at the University of Alberta. Wesner, who works with both elite runners and Skate Canada, says the runner’s high is a lucid physiological state and even has its own polar opposite: “the wall.”

“It started with a blurry haze. I was wobbling and my vision went out and I got really dizzy,” says Simon Bairu, who many believed would break the Canadian world record at the New York City marathon, but instead hit the wall. Bairu, 27, is one of Canada’s top runners — he holds the Canadian record for 10,000-metres and is a safe bet to compete at the 2012 Olympic Games — but he’d never competed in a marathon before and, after running the first half of the race too quickly, he hit a point where he could no longer move.

“I went down and I tried to get back up, but my legs were done,” says Bairu, who will be running the 10K this Saturday in Ottawa. “If I am racing at the Olympics, it’s going to come down to mental preparedness — and that’s something I learned in New York.”

Part of being mentally prepared is bracing yourself for the highs and lows of any run. And whether you’re doing a Learn to Run clinic or your 10th Iron Man, there will be both a time when you feel like you can run forever and a time when you feel like you can’t take even one more step. Brian Vaughan is the president of Gu Energy Lab and a competitive cyclist who bikes in 24-hour races. Gu, which was started by Vaughan’s biophysicist father to make something for his sister’s first 100-mile ultra-marathon, is a leader in sports stimulants.

“You need to be alert and present to appreciate the calm that can come when running, that’s the sweet spot,” says Vaughan, 44, from his company headquarters in Berkeley, Calif. Vaughan describes his 24-hour bike races as a series of mental phases. The first four hours are warm-up, the next eight to 12 hours are the sweet spot — the biking equivalent of the runner’s high — and then, in the middle of the night, the wall.

“You’re thinking: ‘How did I get myself into this mess?’ But then the sun rises, and it’s a whole new beginning, and the body and brain take on a different state,” he says. Vaughan calls this state “enlightened,” and it’s a feeling he tries to capture with amino acids, electrolytes and vitamins C and E in his gels.

But Wolf Bronet doesn’t really buy in so much to the energy gels or the endorphin discussions taking place in the hallways of Berkeley and the University of Bonn.

“Take a baby just born and when he gets up on the floor, he doesn’t walk, the first thing he does is start to run,” says Bronet, who can still be found with the Wolf Pack, his running group, at the Westbury Avenue Y. “All you have to do is put one foot in front of the other. What more is there to know?”

• Want to race the Marathon Man? Can you handle a critique of your form from one of Canada’s elite running coaches? Email running@nationalpost.com to get on the blocks, and follow Ben Kaplan on Twitter: @Np_RunningBen.

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